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Sony Ericsson W960i Review

Hardware Smartphone

Written by admin

Tuesday, 01 April 2008

Page 2 of 2

Design

The Sony Ericsson W960i on first impressions is more like a traditional mobile device than a touch-screen smartphone and this will certainly help with its appeal.

The W960i is also relatively light to hold and features a 2.6” touch screen display, a jogwheel/stylus to the side and a keypad at the base of the screen.

Also to the side is a metal clip, which can be used to loop a cord around (a bit like the cords you find on digital cameras) so that the phone can't accidentally fall when griped in your hand.

This just looks a bit out of place and also prevents you from being able to place the device on a flat surface properly, for taking the odd snap or two (it helps when taking shot using the macro funciton). However with an autofocus function it’s not the end of the world.

Unfortunately the interface is one of the biggest let downs of the W960i, unlike the iPhone which works well as a touch screen, the latter requires the use of all three control methods to get the most from it.

We found that you couldn’t really use the touch-screen effectively without the stylus pen (due to the size of the text) and then at times we had to swap from the latter and use the jogwheel to scroll around the menu options instead.

However after a week of use its something you get used to.

The keypad itself offers the double tap method of text entry but it feels a touch plastic, primarily because the back battery cover tended to emanate that bendy feeling when any pressure was used during texting.

But there is an alternative to gain text input via a Palm style hand recognition system, which allows you to write on the screen with your stylus.

We nearly forgot there is also touch sensitive music playback controls on the front of the W960i, these are quite nice to the touch, but not always responsive as you will find out next.

Software/Features

Ones things for sure the W960i is packed with tons of software and this could be the reason for its performance issues when opening applications.

For sure it’s not going to make you swear in frustration, but there is a delay when moving between apps. This tends to follow suite when playing back music, as there is a noticable3/4 second delay when switching between tracks.

Also the W960i takes a minute to boot up, but we believe all of these issues could easily be fixed with a firmware update.

Going back to the available software for a second, you get Quick office for opening documents (Word, Excel, Powerpoint), pdf viewers, video players, streaming software, PIM applications (calendar, notes etc), the list is far to extensive to list here.

From a multimedia point of view the W960i excels, as well as the 8GB of storage, you have a radio, video player and Walkman software for listening to music.

The latter is enhanced by some pretty useful PC software, which seemed to be able to pick up songs held in our iTunes library and you can even transfer music from the latter to your device (however it can’t transfer purchased music before you ask).

The only criticism was its awkward use of Album art, you have to download the images manually via a link to Google images and then drag and drop the artwork to your albums.

We also had a weird problem happen when syncing our music, after an update on the phone (to reveal new music we added) all the tracks that were already on the phone disappeared, we then had to reset the device and re-scan for the music. Though this only happened once, it could highlight another bug with the device.

Quality from the internal speakers and supplied headphones was great, but you will still need to plug in a propriety connector to get the latter to work. Though on the plus side you can add you own headphones, due to the 3.5mm adaptor attached to the propriety connector.

The supplied camera is 3MP and features an led style flash with a useful macro function. Also you will find in the bundled software a business card scanner, which can take snap shots of a cards text and then it will attempt to read-back the results.

The images taken from the camera indoors were still a touch grainy - even with the led flash - but its close up shots were certainly helped by the macro lens.

Connectivity/Battery

For connectivity options you have a mixed bag, on the one hand you don’t get HSDPA support, though rendering web pages in 3G on the 2.6" screen was still expectable (and it allows for 3G video calls to take place), but we did notice a problem displaying full WebPages on a few occations.

However with Wi-Fi on-board you can take advantage on any Wi-Fi hotspots nearby to boost mobile connectivity speeds.

Battery life was not the best and the device seemed to drain quickly with moderate 3G/multimedia use, so expect to charge this every few days.

Editor review : Final thoughts

13 of 13 people found the following review helpful


Overall rating		7.2
Features		7.0
Design		6.0
Memory		9.0
Connectivity		8.0
Performance		6.0

The Sony W960i seems to get better the longer you use it, at first the interface will seem a struggle and the performance issues off putting, but we believe the latter could be resolved with a Firmware update.

As it is the sheer amount of storage space places the W960i as a more compact alternative to the iPhone.

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